Emma Patchett

Visiting Research Fellow at the Menzies Centre for
Australian Studies, King's College London. My postdoctoral research
focuses on the theme of forced displacement in law and literature, and attempts to explore spatio-legal methodologies as a means of deconstructing the narrative of the host state and sovereign territory. I am also co-editor of a collected volume of essays entitled 'Spatial Justice and Diaspora' , with Sarah Keenan (Birkbeck), which is shortly to be published with Counterpress. Prior to this, I was a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) ITN, based at WWU Muenster, where my doctoral research considered the literary refractions of migration law in the contemporary novels of the Roma diaspora.

Last year, I went to an art exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn by the Swedish duo Lundahl & Seitl. After trailing around the gallery led by text messages from an unknown sender called “the Collector”, we were asked to don headphones and sightless goggles before we entered the second stage of the exhibition. The sensation…

The Gypsy and Traveller community is obliged to have respect for a system which both marginalises and excludes them. On 5 July 2017, a community of Travellers pulled up to Preston Park in Brighton. The council and the police soon descended on them to inform them that they were ‘trespassing’, as the land was covered…

Can we evoke a critical form of solidarity using the emancipatory recognition of Indigenous sovereignty? Any critical solidarity finds difficulty in acknowledging Indigenous populations and refugees as “people forced to the edges of Australian society”, as stated by Walter Shaw from the Tangentyere Council, without running the risk of constructing a dangerous narrative of ‘outsiderness’,…

On the paradoxical semantic ambivalence at the root of the unrooted concept ‘host’ On Wednesday 22nd June 2016, during Refugee Week, Adbul Rahman Haroun was sentenced to nine months in prison under the Malicious Damage Act 1861, prosecuted for ‘dangerous obstruction’ of traffic. This ‘obstruction’ of which it speaks concerns the evasion of high speed…